Meet your favourite knitting and sewing celebrities
The Stitch Stage offers demonstrations, presentations and Q&A’s with some of your favourite knitting and sewing celebrities! They’re all completely free to attend and the line-up is superb. This year The Stitch Stage had an incredible line-up with celebrities including Esme Young, , Nerissa Pratt, Sew Over It’s Lisa Comfort, Black Girl Knit Club, Karen Arthur and more!
Click below to take a look at our timetable from this year’s show.
The Stitch Stage is sponsored by
Stitch Stage 2022 Highlights....
Black Girl Knit Club
As part of this 1-hour talk, Black Girl Knit Club discussed the importance of community and craft and how they have created this sisterhood amongst their club members.
They reflected on their reasons for starting the group in 2019 and discussed the highs and lows of running a new craft business, especially during the pandemic year.
The founders shared highlights from over the years, including creating a series of knitting idents for the BBC during the lockdown and having their unique upcycled “peacock of Ademe” yarn stocked in the prestigious Liberty of London. Most importantly the founders discussed the upcoming release of writing and introductory book Conscious Crafts: Knitting, the book is a part of a series and it unpicks the meditative nature of the knit for creating well-being and mindfulness with projects in the home to clothing accessories.
They invited the audience to reflect on how craft can be used as a tool for change in connecting with ourselves and others.
Esme Young
Esme Young is best known as a judge on the Great British Sewing Bee, but she has also designed costumes for some of the UK’s best-known films. The Stitch festival was delighted to welcome Esme back to the show for another incredible year.
Esme joined us on the Stitch Stage to give a presentation and Q&A.
Karen Arthur
Podcast host and fashion creative, Karen Arthur’s free talk on ‘How to wear your happy and live your boldest life!’ proved a huge success!
Karen Arthur is a Fashion Creative, Sewing tutor and podcast host. She speaks about the positive links between fashion and mental wellbeing – Wear Your Happy – and how this helped her through depression after leaving teaching. Her podcast Menopause Whilst Black, centres the mid life stores of Black British women. Having taken up modelling in her late fifties, you may have seen her smiling eyes gracing the Specsavers TV and billboard campaign. Brought up in Oxfordshire, Karen, a 59 year old grandma, is now based in London.
Lisa Comfort, Sew Over It
Sew Over It are all about stylish sewing patterns, gorgeous fabrics, easy-to-follow classes and expert advice to help you learn to sew one make at a time.
Launched by Lisa Comfort 10 years ago, the Sew Over It mission is simple. They aim to inspire and teach as many people as possible to learn to sew and join their community. Sewing is fun, sustainable and rewarding – there’s nothing like the joy of making something yourself. Sew Over It want to help you create a capsule wardrobe of timeless handmade classics that you’ll wear again and again and they celebrate women of all shapes and sizes and embrace diversity.
At The Stitch Festival in 2022 we hosted an inspiring display of some of Sew Over It’s archive of made-up dress patterns and a stand to view their stylish sewing patterns.
Plus: Steffi Stern from The Makerss, Ros Freeborn, Ruby Lee, Diana Bensted, Sarah Burnett-Moore, Katharine Wight, Jill Kipnis and Stephany Gardiner.
